Allbrick Feature Wall

Background Bricks are an increasingly popular material for constructing expressive architectural facades with high profile projects by architects like Frank Gehry illustrating their potential. However constructing masonry structures with variation in position and orientation of bricks can require time consuming and laborious manual measurements to cross-check brick locations with those specified by design drawings. Researchers have attempted to overcome this problem by automating the placement of bricks using robotic arms. However robotic bricklaying requires a high capital outlay, predictable environmental conditions for precision and still relies on human masons for mortar and the anticipation of possible accumulative error from unexpected movement of bricks during assembly. Contribution The Allbrick Feature Wall introduces a method for assembling brick structures with arbitrary brick positions and locations using interactive holographic models to describe brick locations during construction. The wall design is double curved and would ordinarily require two weeks for a single skilled bricklayer to build using conventional, manual set out methods. The wall was built by a team of three bricklayers in parallel using a shared and interactive holographic model who reported that working from the holographic model enabled them to eliminate the majority of set out tasks and reduce total construction time to 6 hours. Significance The project was supported by in-kind contributions from Allbrick and the University of Tasmania. A short video documenting the project has been played more than 114,000 times and has received widespread attention from design and construction blogs. The idea of bricklaying in mixed reality impacted academia and industry, with other researchers and practitioners employing the approach in permanent buildings and installations. The use of augmented reality for masonry construction was awarded a Gold Now Award.